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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

In passing

The Spokesman-Review

James Freed, 75; museum designer

New York Architect James Ingo Freed, a longtime partner of I.M. Pei and the lead designer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, has died at the age of 75.

His death Thursday at his Manhattan home was announced by his firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners.

Born in 1930 in Essen, Germany, Freed came to the United States at age 9 as the Nazi terror gathered momentum in Europe.

He went to work with the internationally renowned Pei in 1956, and was often overshadowed by him, even as Freed built an independent reputation with apartment houses, public buildings and office towers around the country.

Freed’s designs include the giant glass caverns of the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center in Manhattan, the half-modernist, half-Beaux-Arts main public library in San Francisco, and the country’s second largest federal building, The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington.

His crowning project, though, was the Holocaust Memorial Museum, heralded by critics for its ability to evoke the death camps and ghettos described in its exhibits.

Kurt Singer, 94; biographer, spy novelist

Santa Barbara, Calif. Kurt Singer, an anti-Nazi activist and spy during World War II whose dozens of books include works on espionage and biographies ranging from Hitler henchman Hermann Goering to song-and-dance man Danny Kaye, has died. He was 94.

Singer died Dec. 9 in Santa Barbara, Calif., of natural causes.

The prolific and eclectic writer, born in Vienna, Austria, grew up in Berlin, where he became increasingly worried about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. With his first wife, Hilde Tradelius, he began publishing an anti-Nazi underground weekly in 1933. The Nazis soon put a price on his head, and he fled to Stockholm, Sweden. In Sweden and later in the U.S., the writer functioned as a spy, providing information for the Allies about Russian and Nazi activities in Scandinavia.

When Singer published the biography “Goering: Germany’s Most Dangerous Man” in 1940, Germany demanded that Sweden confiscate all copies and hand over Singer. Although Sweden originally denied the extradition, it did ban the book, and Singer made plans to leave for the United States.

In 1943, Singer published “Duel for the Northland: The War of Enemy Agents in Scandinavia.” That book sparked a long line of works about the espionage business.

In the 1950s, Singer returned to biography, chronicling Kaye, Charles Laughton, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Schweitzer and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

William Oswald, 86; environmental scientist

Concord, Calif. William J. Oswald, a University of California at Berkeley scientist who made algae the central feature of an innovative method for the treatment of sewage, died Dec. 8 of pancreatic cancer at his home in Concord, Calif. He was 86.

An emeritus professor of environmental engineering, Oswald invented a natural method for treating effluent using a series of algae ponds. He designed more than 50 pond systems in the western United States and around the world and was particularly committed to introducing his low-cost, self-sustaining technology in developing countries, such as India.

Another of his inventions, called the high-rate pond, has been a boon to worldwide production of microscopic algae for the health-food industry.

The New Yorker magazine, in a 1998 article chronicling his efforts to introduce the pond system in India, said, “Oswald is to algae what Michael Jordan is to basketball.”